Pageviews

Monday, October 7, 2013

Making Sight Cooler

Many
people around the world have bad eyesight and need glasses for it. The only problems
with the glasses of today are that the only thing that it helps with is your
eyesight. Google Glass is changing that with a pretty cool piece of technology
they've built.Google Glass is basically just a set of glasses with some processing
power built into a small compartment on the side. This compartment then
projects its operations onto the glass and what the user sees. The basic ideas
that Glass started out with is using it for a GPS. Why plug in an address when
you can speak "I want to go to San Francisco" and it can give you a
route there. Another intended use was to be synced with a person's phone such
as with smart watches. For example, say you get a text while you're at a
meeting, instead of pulling out your phone and being disruptive you can just
look in the corner of your glasses and look at it. This could work the same way
with tweets, e-mail, and news. Those are some of its basic intended uses, but
as always the people have thought of more. What Google has done is allowed
developers (talented ones) to write software for apps on Glass. Some apps that
have been proposed are the familiar Snapchat, which would use the built-in
camera to take a picture easier than with a phone. There has also been an app
that was developed that you can take any given building and redesigns the outer
design with what you see. There are some pretty cool ideas out there for Glass,
and unfortunately at the stage that Glass is in in development, it just can't
handle a lot of things. Not to mention it’s only available by getting it
especially provided to you by Google, and if it does get released publicly, it
will be over $1000. Google Glass has brought up some ethical arguments as well
about how integrated humans are with technology, an argument doubtlessly
brought up with every new gadget, but actually a lot more relevant here. One
argument is asking if anyone would be able to stay focused. If you've
constantly got updates that you're looking at while driving or while at work
will people ever be productive? That focus question also brings safety into it.
Although apps have the potential to make the roads safer by making drivers more
aware of their surroundings, it also has the potential to distract them. All in
all Google Glass is a very interesting idea that with some work and some good
old American ingenuity could be a very viable and useful tool for society.